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Tuesday, 27 January 2015

Written in Stone

Sunkenkirk

Like most children’s authors, I make occasional school visits where I talk about
‘where ideas come from’ and tell some of the stories behind the historically based
fantasies such as Troll Fell and Dark Angels which
represent most of my output so far.Usually at
the end of each visit the children ask me questions, and though some
require a certain amount of patience to answer (such as: ‘What made you start
writing?’ when I’ve just spent forty-five minutes explaining that very thing), the majority are intelligent and thoughtful - even insightful.The best question ever put to me was from a
boy of 13 or so who asked, ‘If you could go back to anywhere in the past, where
would you go?’

No one had asked me that before. No one has asked it since.
I had to stop and think. Where would
I go?There’s a short story – could
it be by Ray Bradbury? – about time-trippers who go back to the beginning of the
First Century to try and witness the Crucifixion. It all
goes wrong for them.I thought about
that; it didn’t seem appropriate: and suddenly I knew just where I'd want
to go. ‘Stonehenge,’ I said. ‘I’d love to go back to when they were building
Stonehenge, and find out what they were really doing there.’ The boy nodded
seriously.To him, too, it seemed a good
time and place to visit.

We're gradually learning more and
more about Stonehenge and its landscape: the story, whatever it is, is becoming
ever more fascinating. But we’ll still never really know what they were doing there,
will we?Not for sure, even if we can
speculate. Has any trace of what they believed come down to us?What were their myths and legends? What hero
stories did they tell?

The archaeologist Francis Pryor, in his book ‘Britain BC’, writes
of the Northern Irish Bronze and Iron Age site known as Navan Fort (County
Armagh):

The Cattle Raid of Cooley describes how the mythical hero Cú Chulainn
helps Conchobar, king of Ulster, based at his capital Emain Macha (pronounced
Owain Maha) exact retribution for a cattle raid carried out by warriors of the
rival power of Connacht, to the south. Scholars are agreed that The Cattle Raid of Cooley refers to events in pre-Christian
Ireland.There can be no doubt that Emain
Macha was the capital of the Ulster kings.And it just so happens that it is also the Irish name for Navan Fort.

Navan Fort, Co Armagh (wikimedia)

In the early Iron Age a series of nine roundhouses were built at Navan Fort; but in the first century 100 BC these were replaced by a massive wooden structure of over 250 tall posts arranged in concentric rings. Shortly afterwards, it was filled with boulders and burned to the ground. From the air, the open excavation shows a regular, segmented, pizza-like appearance. Pryor adds:

... Chris Lynn has made a special study of the symbolism and
imagery surrounding Navan.He considers
that the huge, post-built structure that was erected in 94 BC was a bruidne, or
magic hostelry; these have been likened to an Iron Age Valhalla.According to the Irish epics the heroes were lavishly
feasted in the bruidne, then at the end of the meal it was burned down around
them and they were immolated where they sat.

Navan Fort, excavation

Here,
perhaps, is a tiny glimpse of the significance of a prehistoric monument,
preserved - as they say - in legend and in song. You can read about just such an immolation in part of the Ulster cycle, The Destruction of Da Derga's Hostel ("Da Derga" means "Red God"). Da Derga's Hostel, or inn, was in Leinster and as far as I know has no modern presence, but its story suggests possibilities for the burned structure at Emain
Macha. 'Seven doorways there are in it, and seven sleeping rooms
between every two doorways'. in which Conaire Mor, High King of Ireland, dies, having breached the conditions of several geasa laid on him at birth. Conaire is a heroic Iron Age figure:

The colour of his hair was like
the shining of purified gold; the cloak about him was like the mist of a May
morning, changing from colour to colour; a wheel brooch of gold reaching from
his chin to his waist; his golden-hilted sword within his reach.

But he and his company are attacked by outlaws, the
Three Red Hounds of Cualu and their ally Ingcel the One-Eyed:

...three times the Inn was set on
fire and three times it was put out again... and at last there was none left in
the Inn with Conaire but Conall, and Sencha, and Dubthach.Now from the rage that was on Conaire, and
the greatness of the fight he had fought, a great drought came on him, and such
a fever of thirst, and no drink to get, that he died of it.

It’s exciting, stirring, it
gives me goosebumps, but it’s the exception rather than the rule.What were the stories told by the builders of
Stonehenge? We have none earlier than the medieval conjectures of
Geoffrey of Monmouth, who thought Merlin built it with the help of Irish giants.

It’s not just Stonehenge though. Over 1000 stone circles can
still be seen in the British Isles, even if many are small and insignificant. I
once took my husband and children to try and rediscover a little one on the
moors above Malham in the Yorkshire Dales, where I used to live. It’s marked on
the Ordnance Survey map, and I’d visited it by myself years before: a rough
group of a few knee-high boulders leaning out of the moor-grass. We couldn’t find it, and not only that, there
was an inexplicable, lowering, heavy gloom about the day which sapped our
spirits. The children whined, we felt depressed: we gave up and returned home to
discover, later, an eclipse of the sun had been happening during our walk. Not
a total eclipse, but enough to explain the failure of the light, the doomy
sense of pointlessness we’d felt. And whoever built that little circle,
thousands of years ago – what would they have made of our experience?

In the Lakes last summer, driving back over Black Combe from the
coast at Ravenglass, I spotted the tiny symbol of a stone circle marked on the
route map. It took a bit of finding, diving up the tiny twisting roads and
finally squishing the car into a hedge and tramping up a mile and a quarter of
rough trackway towards a distant farm. I
wasn’t expecting much.I thought it
would be like the Malham circle, a small set of minor stones poking out of the
turf. As we drew nearer to the
farmhouse, we saw this:

And getting closer, this:

This was no minor stone circle. It is Sunkenkirk, or Swinside
Stone Circle, on the north-east side of Black Combe, and it's almost
complete, containing 55 stones. (I made it 58, but that included some
broken bits.) We tied the dog to the gate, as there were sheep and
cattle in the field, and went in.

Once inside, I tried to photograph it in quadrants. The circle lies -
like Castlerigg - on a high, flattish plateau surrounded on all sides by
a horizon of noble hills. It feels like a dancing floor or a theatre.

It even has a sort of ceremonial porch on the southeastern side, a set of double stones flanking the entrance.

It was a beautiful, serene afternoon. The worn stones glowed in the late
sunshine. The circle was so complete, it felt as though the people who
built and used it had only just gone away, instead of being dust for
5000 years.

But who were they? Why did they build it and what did it mean to them?
We have only the name Sunkenkirk, and a tale - for we will always tell
tales - that it was built by the Devil, who busied himself at night in
pulling down and removing the stones of a church which was being built
in the day. That's a new, young story, perhaps a hundred years old. We
will never know what stories were told about this circle immediately
after it was built, or through most of the rest of its long, long
history.

In an essay called 'Burning Bushes' (from 'In Other Worlds: SF and the
Human Imagination', Virago 2011), Margaret Atwood speculates on the
value of art to early societies: that those who possessed

... such abilities as singing,
dancing and – for our purposes – the telling of stories – would have had a
better chance of survival than those without them. That makes a certain sense:
if you could tell your children about the time your grandfather was eaten by a crocodile,
right there at the bend of the river, they would be more likely to avoid the
same fate. If, that is, they were listening.

Language and narrative are inextricable one from another. Every sentence we speak lays a narrative template
over experience and alters our perceptions. In
the beginning was the Word: we create our own
worlds in our own images. If you can tell a ‘true’ story about
the crocodile at the bend of the river, fiction and myth spring at once
into existence. Because you can tell another story, about how bravely
your grandfather fought the crocodile (even if you weren't there
yourself): and that leads almost inevitably to the question of where he
is now - surely not mere crocodile food, but a hero in the world of
ancestors, who passes his wisdom down to you and maybe speaks to you in
dreams.

Some years ago I visited this grassy barrow. There it is the in the
middle of the photograph, looking just like so many I've seen in
England: but we know who lies there, and who buried them, and when, and why. It's
the burial place of the Plataean forces who fought alongside the
Athenians commanded by Miltiades, against the Persians under Darius, at
the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC. We know, because the story was
written down. And knowing it sent prickles down my spine.

The battle of Marathon was written as history (though maybe not history
as we conceive of it today) not too long after the events themselves. 'The Cattle Raid of Cooley'
was only written down centuries after the events it purports to
describe, after the oral tradition and mythification process, the
business of turning fact into fiction, had got well under way. Yet as
in the tales of Troy and Knossos, some truths were preserved in the
storytelling, like flies in amber. But there are no such stories for
Stonehenge, no hero tales from Sunkenkirk. And that's why, if I could
travel back in time I'd still go to the the third millenium BC and visit
them.

For me the most telling aspect of somewhere like Stonehenge, is the ingenuity that must have gone into building it. I saw a documentary long ago where they tried to recreate the great Trilothon from Stonehenge, and had to admit defeat unless they used modern engineering methods to raise the larger stones upright.

This shows, if nothing else, that there were some brilliant minds around in prehistoric Britain. They may have had less knowledge than us about the world, but there must have been at least a few brains to rival our greatest engineers and scientists for all that.

really interesting post, Kath. It is odd that we have Greek myths and history in a recogniseable form (from a narrative and psychology point of view) and relating to recognisable geographical and archaological features, but have lost the equivalent ancient stories from these isles. The versions we have, like the Cattle raid of Cooley or the Mabinogion stories, feel so much less comprehensible and complete (I feel like I am grasping after dreams, after a way of thinking I've forgotten how to remember when I read them). And yes, how is it that something like Stonehenge doesn't feature at all in any such truly old stories?

Laura, the best way to visit Stonehenge is to walk over the fieldpaths from Woodhenge past the King Barrows. Fabulous country views of the stones. And try Avebury, it's so big it swallows up the visitors! Lily, I agree - 'like grasping after dreams'. Lovely phrase!

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